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Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- megous 2y agoThe reaction email doesn't have some specific header that can be used to block it?
- ppbjj 2y agoThat would be a pretty suboptimal user experience for both parties, don't you think?
- megous 2y agoDepends on what you're optimizing for, how big of a problem not knowing whether someone read your email is to you specifically, and for what kinds of emails/senders this happens.
- projektfu 2y agoThe UX problem is you send an e-mail, and someone "thumbs up" a response, and then you block the response and assume that they didn't care to respond, while they think they have responded.
- AlexandrB 2y agoThe distance between "didn't care to respond" and a thumbs up emoji response is measured in angstroms.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoWith a thumbs-up I know they've read it, and that's worth quiet a bit in this asynchronous communication world of ours.
- ryandrake 2y agoWe used to (and I believe still) have Read Receipts for this.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoread receipts just mean you opened the message, not that you actually read it. It's a terrible misnomer.
- m3047 2y agoYes! +1 And it's possible to disable Read Receipts and a lot of people do. A lot of people mangle beacon pixels too.
- xenophonf 2y agoOh yeah, the thing I always turn off or filter out because the last thing I need is another way spies and hackers and ad men can track every waking moment of my life.
- toyg 2y agoRead Receipts are invasive, because they signal when I read it - which might well not be when I want to reply. I could read an email today and then decide I'll reply tomorrow or next Wednesday, because reasons; but the sender will see the read receipt and just assume I hate their guts for not replying immediately to the Most Important Person In The World (i.e. them). So I turn them off as a matter of routine on all my accounts.
- projektfu 2y agoThat was another groupware feature that was great for small orgs and terrible for the general net.
- projektfu 2y agoI suppose it'd be OK if the other side of your TCP connections stopped sending ACKs.
- megous 2y agoThis is cute, but not how email communication works. There's no need for explicit answer to any email, otherwise people would never stop responding.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> not how email communication works. There's no need for explicit answer to any email Obviously context dependent. For time-sensitive emails, it’s common to follow up with a call if receipt isn’t acknowledged.
- m3047 2y agoBe sure to CC everybody. /s No. The technology isn't built for this.
- projektfu 2y agoI'm pretty sure a large number of e-mail conversations (i.e. not just announcements) end in one person saying, "OK", "Will do", "See you then", "I'm too busy, sorry" or some such response. It's very uncommon to send out an e-mail to someone and ask them to do something or consider something and then assume it has been received without acknowledgement.
- m3047 2y agoEmail is used for a lot of things. It could be used as a message broker in batch processing systems. /s (Seriously, there are MIME types for that.) I'm being surrounded right now by examples in multiple domains where it is clear that the moral of the story is that one person taking an action is different than a company packaging that action up and selling it as a solution to a general problem. This seems to be a lesson which needs to be generally remembered, explored, and learned. Again. While one person responding "will do!" is appropriate 1:1, it is typically not appropriate to /reply all/ when doing it or to reply to a distribution list when doing it. I mean there are exceptions to everything: "Reply 'will do!' to this all-staff@ message or you're fired." But generally it's a meme, an anti-pattern (and there, I did it again). Many people have built autoreply systems for email to respond with helpful advice to frequent topics. (Happy to help, I've done it before.) Similarly email clients (MUAs) which have macro / scripting capabilities for filtering or replying are not new. What's new here? If it can be called new, it's that somebody provided that macro capability and linked it to an optional email header the sender can provide which enables / disables the ability to run macros in the client. In theory; or something. We (or at least I) don't know if it's possible to add your own macros. I imagine this comes with tools in the client or in alias management to manage "reply all" / "me too": in other words it might be possible for someone to disable macros when responding to messages sent to all-staff@. I expect other extensions which reach across boundaries of control to follow if this one floats, and that's why I consider it a shitshow.
- HelloMcFly 2y agoThe distance between "not detectable" and "detectable" is vast and significant, no matter how minute the unit of measurement.
- megous 2y agoNo. When you block an email the sender will get a notification email from their mail server that their message was blocked. They will not assume anything for very long.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> When you block an email the sender will get a notification email from their mail server that their message was blocked And if that blocked message was a reaction I’d assume I can move on: they sent an email, I sent a response, they refused to accept it and then spammed me to boot.
- m3047 2y ago> and then spammed me to boot There is a misunderstanding about how this works and how email works: * Rejecting an email during the SMTP exchange results in the /sending/ server returning a response to the sender. This is NOT spam and it not under the control of the receiver. * Rejecting an email post-acceptance and sending a reply is called /blowback/ and is typically considered poor practice and a type of spam. (But not UCE.) * Adding a header to an outgoing message which causes the recipient's email server to possibly generate an email message to the recipient when they reply has nothing to do with the sender. The recipient's email provider is doing this, and the problem is you. Let's recapitulate: 1) You use Microsoft as an ESP. 2) Somebody sends you a message, received by your ESP with this header. 3) Your ESP takes an action based on this header which results in you receiving feedback. The whole thing is a shitshow, oblivious to externalities; but whatever.
- megous 2y agoNobody will spam you except your service provider. My mail server will just return error to your service provider when it tries to send email to it over SMTP.
- projektfu 2y agoI agree, this is clearly worse, whether it's "your e-mail has been rejected" or "this server is not configured to accept 'reactions'", it's unnecessarily hostile to a user who probably doesn't understand that Microsoft has done something non-standard. And they will probably assume that you don't know what you're doing, because your e-mail doesn't work.
- walrus01 2y agoIf a person has something substantive to say to me they can put out the effort to type at least one human written full sentence in reply, either via a message platform like slack, signal, or replying to the email.
- Arnavion 2y agoI just tested with an Exchange domain and nope, the reaction email has only standard headers and a bunch of x-ms- headers that are the same as for a regular email from that domain. In particular, it has an `x-ms-publictraffictype: Email` header that regular emails also have, and the envelope content-type and inner content-types are also identical (`multipart/alternative` and `text/plain; charset="us-ascii"` / `text/html; charset="us-ascii"` respectively).
- JohnFen 2y agoOh, this is good to know! I haven't encountered this issue personally yet, but maybe once I've updated my mailserver, I won't encounter it in the future. Now to figure out how to stop the same thing happening in SMS.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cogthrow 2y agoYou'll be glad to hear that SMS already doesn't have reactions
- dirtyhippiefree 2y agoSMS is being replaced with RCS, which does have reactions…even Apple is adding RCS… Welcome to the future.
- JohnFen 2y agoRCS is already here on Android, but I keep it disabled in order to avoid read receipts and typing indicators.
- bradboimler 2y agoYou can disable read receipts and typing indicators without disabling RCS
- JohnFen 2y agoYou can? That didn't used to be the case on my phone at all. Glad to hear they changed that.
- bradboimler 2y agoI use Google Messages. I assumed that was what you were using too. Messages settings - RCS chats - Send read receipts and Show typing indicators.
- nickdothutton 2y agoEvery day a new form of cancer.
- ryandrake 2y agoIt's truly exhausting how often I read a tech article and think, "Just when you think software couldn't get worse..."
- m463 2y agoWhat if every time users added a reaction to an email, they got "microsoft points" towards unlocking new reaction emojis? :) (gah, maybe it's dangerous to even joke about this)
- KTibow 2y agoDon't tell the Bing team.
- walrus01 2y agoImagine a poop emoji stamping on a human face, forever.
- thenickdude 2y agoYou'll absolutely love this one then: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/funny-or-annoying-how-googles-new-audio-emoji-feature-works-on-android/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/funny-or-ann...
- p51-remorse 2y agoI kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”. Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
- morder 2y agoI would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoGenuine question: why?
- cogthrow 2y agoOld Man Yells At Cloud.jpg
- Eggpants 2y agoYoung’in needs constant positive reinforcement or they go all emo.jpg
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoImagine thinking being generally sociable and polite is in any way, at all, a negative thing.
- ryandrake 2y agoThis question is how we get opinionated software that slowly-but-surely stops serving the user. "I don't like it" should be a perfectly valid reason for turning off a feature.
- RiOuseR 2y ago[dead]
- stratocumulus0 2y agoI remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lilyball 2y agoPerhaps the emails have both html and plain text representations, and you've configured your client to only show the plain text version?
- theamk 2y agoyou almost got it! This was likely winmail.dat/TNEF[0], Microsoft's proprietary replacement of HTML. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
- adzm 2y agoTNEF is a container/encapsulation format rather than a markup language. It can contain HTML as well as RTF and plain text. Granted HTML rendering of email is full of quirks in Outlook
- throwaway3306a 2y agoIt's using Word to render html. They tried using a browser engine but then it rendered a copy-pasted Word text differently and users hated that.
- 2y ago
- raspyberr 2y agoThis is exactly the sort of thing that unix old timers would have done. Funny its getting disliked cause it's microsoft
- snapcaster 2y agoCan an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is
- JohnFen 2y agoIn email, it would just be an annoyance that bulks out the inbox. Not a huge deal, but filtering them out would improve the experience. Reactions make more sense to me in a kind of communication where you're doing real-time conversational stuff and brevity is important, such as instant messaging. In email, it doesn't really add anything.
- xenophonf 2y agoIt isn't materially different than replying "OK" in that both a thumb's-up notification and an "OK" reply both act as distractions from whatever meaningful activity I'm engaging in, the same with all the DINGS and BUZZES and BANNERS and POP UPS that vie for my precious attention. I've struggled my entire life trying to control my focus, and it's like the rest of humanity has decided to go all in on filling our shared environment with even more distractions. It sucks. It's manipulative. Let me turn it off. Leave me be. Better yet, help me pay attention to the things _I_ value. /rant
- p51-remorse 2y agoThis is actually something I like about Slack’s implementation: reactions don’t generate notifications.
- yoyoyo1122 2y agoYou can disable reaction notifications in Teams too but it's not the default option.
- whyoh 2y agoI, just like the blog author, disable remote images in emails. So I wouldn't get the "intended experience" anyway. Actually, does anyone besides Outlook users get the intended experience here? Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward. So it's not being "anti-reaction" in general, it's being against some feature that only works in MS email apps, which then pops up in broken form elsewhere.
- whyoh 2y agoThis kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have, where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device's contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sense/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sens... It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it's just one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago> To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. Or banish machines running Microsoft software from the network.
- ubermonkey 2y agoSure, Jan.
- karaterobot 2y agoFrom that article: > (So if you want to opt out of Google Maps and Wi-Fi Sense at the same time, you must change your SSID of, say, myhouse to myhouse_optout_nomap. Technology is great.) I knew about the Google Maps thing, I didn't know about this. That kind of stuff is so presumptuous and user hostile it's outrageous.
- kazinator 2y agoWould it be better to have an op-out database, where you have to log in with a Google account, and prove that you own the device somehow using geolocation? The system has to be resistant against bad actors taking someone else off the map who chooses to opt in. It would be better if the syntax were simpler, like changing myhouse to __myhouse (double underscore == private identifier). By setting SSID a certain way, you simultaneously show your intent to opt out and prove that you're the operator.
- voltaireodactyl 2y ago
- RedShift1 2y agoI haven't seen this type of messages. Where is it coming from?
- munchler 2y agoMicrosoft Outlook. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reactions-in-microsoft-outlook-06315501-a790-4a2a-90c1-fbc89d84c393 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reactions-in-micr...
- RedShift1 2y agoGood lord, IMO this has no place in a business environment
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoWait till you see the state of error messages today. Not far from this joke https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie
- eadmund 2y agoNow if only there were a way to prevent iPhone users from sending reactions to my SMS messages!
- bitwize 2y ago"Or you can use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from my former job
- Hamuko 2y agoIs that what I'm supposed to tell to all those Outlook users?
- kazinator 2y agoOr, you know, you could just turf all e-mails with those "reacted to your message" Subject: headers, and not use any MS specific headers in what you send. This reaction thing seems like a gift from Microsoft to spammers. E-mail recipients have a "like" button that instantly generates a reply, validating that the e-mail address is staffed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pavon 2y agoUgh that is stupid. Outlook/Exchange already add a bunch of custom headers - you'd think they could use those to opt-in clients that are known to support this feature instead of making the rest of the world opt-out. That approach would provide a better experience for both Outlook users (since they would always know who could actually receive their reactions) and non-Outlook users (who wouldn't have to put up with the annoying reaction spam).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ffhhj 2y agoMicrosoft have made several oopsies in the past ignoring opt-outs, i.e. OneDrive.
- xyst 2y agoApple added the same thing for iMessage/SMS. It worked as expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get spammed with ‘{person} liked “{message}”’. In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.
- airtonix 2y agoOn second thoughts (looks at Camelot), let's not go there. It's a silly place.
- bschwindHN 2y agoI like how you word this in the past tense, it still happens to this day. I live outside the states but keep a google voice number and in my family's group chat I still get these all the time. I've mostly (miraculously) moved them to Signal, but they revert to their SMS ways occasionally.
- justusthane 2y agoRCS is finally coming to iOS though, so soon this should be resolved.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoNot to Google Voice though, because Google loves nothing more than orphaning communications products.
- tracker1 2y agoWhich is a shame... I think when Hangouts had GV and SMS integration in a single app, that was probably the pinnacle of usage for power user messaging. It's all been down hill since then. Going back to the separate GV app has mostly sucked, and still stagnating. Google should really give a bit of credit (bonus levels) for advancing and maintaining existing applications. Their motivation structure is backwards.
- orthoxerox 2y agoReminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, which used to mangle IRC messages to pass additional metadata.
- joelthelion 2y agoIn an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of "great, thank you " emails. Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
- rightbyte 2y agoThe UI to spot the 'reaction' is really bad though. I got a mail to my work Outlook which was some kind of daily digest with the thumbs up.
- setopt 2y agoI’m not an Outlook user, and I really dislike the product. But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get someone’s attention in large email threads with too many on CC would have been adopted by more mail clients.
- rob74 2y agoI'm a Linux user myself, but I've since given up on using a standalone email client, and just use the Outlook web interface...
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoThunderbird.
- graemep 2y agoWhy? Because of these reactions? I have never seen one myself.
- greggsy 2y agoSomething like an iMessage of mail. Surely there’s an RFC for that right?
- Andrex 2y agoI've always thought about just making a chat client app using email as the underlying standard. Strip out CSS and signatures (and funnel spam/marketing to a separate UI) and bam, you have possibly the most widely-interoperable chat client ever made. The ostensible "problem" with this would probably be "email is too slow for real-time chat!" But really, how much difference does a few seconds make? And modern connections/tech make me think that idea might have to be reevaluated anyways. It wouldn't be a business but I could see such an app becoming quite popular.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- skrebbel 2y agoTo be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too? IMO the fallback, that internally it’s just a regular, human-readable email, is quite neat (though I wonder how they dealt with other languages than English - do they know which language the email is in? Is it just always English? That’d be bad). I work on a chat component library (https://talkjs.com https://talkjs.com) and we support both emoji reactions and email notifications for missed chat messages. These emails can be replied to and they show up as chat messages in the conversation. It’d be very natural for us to add reaction support to the emails too, but I’d be reluctant to do so if it means a great UX for Outlook users but a terrible UX (overload of little reaction emails) for the rest.
- wiktor-k 2y ago> To be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too? Just copying what I said in the other thread: there actually is a standard for that already: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078 Sadly, it seems it doesn't have broad adoption: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1724363 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1724363
- resonanttoe 2y agoYears ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by producing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat - IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren't hidden in normal IRC clients. All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users and didn't want to work at establishing it themselves at the time. (The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel) Feels very similar where MS' entire philosophy is, if it works for us, we don't care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly. Course it doesn't work that way, Sys-admins just end up banning/filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.
- davidgerard 2y agoat least it gave us Jerkcity
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- KineticLensman 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gadders 2y agoI don't have strong feelings about this, but can someone please change the emoji palette in Teams? I feel like I'm typing in Club Penguin chat.
- shermantanktop 2y agoI wonder if tech nostalgia has reached the point where someone has built a Club Penguin chat clone.
- shermantanktop 2y agoOh no, the truth is worse than I imagined: https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-shuts-down-club-penguin-clone-2020-5?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-shuts-down-club-pengu...
- walthamstow 2y agoReminds of of the Chris Morris movie Four Lions, in which the would-be terrorists use a similar kids side called Puffin Party to coordinate.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jwr 2y agoIt's pretty amazing how Microsoft has consistently been shitting all over E-mail for the last 30 years or so. I still remember how Outlook was introduced in the 90s and E-mail started going down the drain because of it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lopis 2y agoThis is the "extend" part of "EEE", where companies try to make it a nuisance to not use their products based on a standard tech stack.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mrgoldenbrown 2y agoIt was annoying when Apple did this with SMS. I haven't seen it yet in my workplace, maybe our admins found a way to turn it off?
- fourg 2y agoBless them
- AzzyHN 2y agoReactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room. Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
- lupusreal 2y agoUsing reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing should have the popular new thing, because that would be good for their career.
- usr1106 2y agoIn our company we work a lot remotely and everyone is in chat when working hour. Emojis are used a lot. It's much less disturbing if n people give a thumbs up to acknowledge a message instead of everyone typing a new message "OK". Especially when they read hours later.Also "working on it" is common if someone reports a problem. Additionally emojis serves a social purpose. Instead of chatting in the office kitchen there are all kind of humorous reactions.
- 9dev 2y agoSame for us. If I write in the general channel that I will be five minutes late for the meeting, I don’t need everyone to say, „okay, thanks for letting us know“, a simple thumbs up from someone is enough to know at least one person has read this and will inform the rest, if necessary. And that goes for a lot of situations - I’m gonna deploy, looking at this bug now, just ping me if you need help… all of those messages don’t warrant a full reply, just a short token of acknowledgement or appreciation is enough and doesn’t force you to come up with a polite string of words that do the same thing, but more verbose.
- prepend 2y agoI love the thumbs up on email. Even outside of outlook world, I’d rather get the robot template than have to open something to figure out it’s a sentence or two saying “ok.”
- davemosk 2y agoThis solution breaks DKIM - it inserts new postfix headers. You can do the same thing in Thunderbird by going into the config editor and adding your own "x-ms-reactions: disallow" headers as per https://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers https://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers